House of Hearts - Hardcover

Arndt, Skyla

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593693191 ISBN 13: 9780593693193

Verlag: Viking Books for Young Readers, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Solving her best friend's murder means infiltrating a secret society, resisting a forbidden love, and running from a vengeful ghost in this sophomore novel by the author of Together We Rot.

“An intoxicating blend of romance and horror, darkness and wit. With haunts and twists that leap off the page, this was a rabbit hole I was happy to fall down.” —Ava Reid, #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Study in Drowning

Violet Harper knows her best friend was murdered. Even if everyone else has labeled her death a “freak accident,” Vi is sure she’d been trying to tell her something right before she died. Cryptic messages about her friend’s elite boarding school, her whirlwind romance, and the mysterious secret society she was entangled in all point to a more sinister fate.

So, Violet does what no one else seems willing to do: She transfers to the same fancy school to dig into the society’s murky history and find out what really happened to her friend. She knows the truth might not be pretty, but what she doesn’t bargain for is the handsome boy at the center of it all—Calvin Lockwell, the brother of her prime suspect and descendant of the school’s founder. He’s obnoxious and privileged, and Violet can’t deny their haunting attraction. It soon becomes clear his family is hiding a dark secret that may not be of this world, and suddenly Violet’s following her friend’s doomed footsteps down the rabbit hole. Even as details emerge of a deadly curse plaguing the school, she can’t escape her true feelings for Calvin. But loving him may be the last thing she ever does.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Skyla Arndt has always loved the creepy, crawly side of life. When she was younger, she thought that love might translate to hunting Bigfoot, but luckily for him, writing proved easier. Together We Rot is her debut novel.

Connect with her at ArndtSkyla.com or @ArndtSkyla on Instagram or Twitter. (Howling at the moon works, too.)

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1
I didn’t come to Hart Academy for a $40,000 high school diploma, but something tells me “cold-­blooded revenge” would’ve looked bad on my admissions essay. At the very least, I’m sure they wouldn’t have sent me the brochure if they knew I’d cross the headmistress’s eyes out in black Sharpie.
I slap on the smile I practiced in the mirror and bury my vendetta six feet deep. I’ll unearth it later, but for now I need to look like any other perfectly adjusted, super-­excited senior. I could at least pretend to be happy, right? I’m standing at the gates of the crème de la crème of boarding schools: a wealthy academy in Upstate New York where old-­money families off-load their children each fall. Anyone in my shoes would be ecstatic to be here—­well, almost anyone. My mother’s wearing an identical pair of sneakers, and all she’s doing is sniffling into a tissue.
“I promised myself I wouldn’t cry,” she says, crying.
She’s been doing that all morning. It started after her tenth snoozed alarm, and it continued the entire three-­hour drive in the car—­Google Maps couldn’t get a word in without my mother blubbering into the steering wheel.
I hand her the last Kleenex in the pack. We’ve gone through several. “I’ll call every night.”
She accepts my offering with a final blow of her nose. “You better! Oh, Violet, I’m so worried about you. You packed your pepper spray, right?” she whispers entirely too loudly. “You know I don’t trust rich kids—­their parents have good lawyers. They could get away with anything.”
God, don’t I know it.
I stretch that fake smile further for my mother’s sake. It’s starting to chafe. “Yes, Mom. It’s in the front pocket of my duffel bag.”
“And your little whistle?” she presses.
“Yes, Mom. It’s on my key chain.”
“What about—­?”
“Mom, trust me, I’ve got it all. Do I have to show you my laminated checklist?” I swivel around to pull it out once again. My packing list (however small) has been highlighted and checked off several times over. If it were up to Mom, she would’ve packed a mismatched pair of socks, an old blanket I had when I was five, and then nothing else because she would’ve been too busy bawling.
“Oh, Violet, when did you get so grown up?”
Probably at age eight when Mom’s deadbeat ex smashed a beer bottle against the wall and I spent the rest of the night in my room staging our elaborate escape. “I’m pretty sure I was born this way.”
She harrumphs but doesn’t argue with me there.
“Quit worrying so much. C’mon, isn’t it breathtaking? It looks just like the website.”
This time I’m not lying. It is breathtaking, but I’m also completely and utterly out of my element. Our trailer-­park home is a far cry from the Gothic gray stone library; our Ford Fiesta sticks out like a sore thumb against the lot of sleek armored cars. “Did you know this school was featured in Architectural Digest?”
I gesture to the building beside us. The Great Hall lies in the quadrangle like a sleeping beast, its enormous body embellished with sandstone and its oriel eye focused on the courtyard ahead. Students mill through its arched ribs, their bags slung across their backs and their phones poised at the ready. I don’t blame them; every inch of this place is begging to be immortalized on canvas. It’s beautiful. It’s perfect. It’s the site of an open murder investigation. Or at least it should be.
“C’mon!” I urge, tugging Mom deeper into the crime scene.
It hardly looks like one anymore. Instead of police tape and chalk lines, we’ve got cotton candy and balloon animals, welcome back, students! strung high from dogwood trees. It’s a lesson in extravagance, a nightmare of confetti and rose topiaries and Golden Goose sneakers.
Nothing about it screams “a girl died here a year ago”—­no funeral attire or memorial imagery scattered among the fairgrounds. My best friend’s death has been scrubbed away in time for orientation. Headmistress Lockwell and her family saw to that.
“Ooh, can we see that?” Mom’s voice rips me back to the present. She cuts off an exhausted custodian before he can toss a crumpled map into the trash. Smoothing out the wrinkled folds, she jabs at the center. “God, Vi, all right, I’ll give you one thing: This place is fancy. There’s a regulation tennis court and an Olympic-­size swimming pool and—­”
I cut her off gently. “We don’t have time to look at the pool, Ma. We need to get to the new-student orientation. We’re all the way over here, and we have five minutes to get there.”
“Here” is sandwiched between the Great Hall and Fitzpatrick-­Wallace Library. “There” shines like a beacon in the distance, a journey beyond a sprawling family of green hills.
She huffs like a lectured child but doesn’t press the issue. Instead, she follows my lead as I push our way through the crowd. What we lack in money, I more than make up for in false confidence. My power walk is honed from years of customer service—­shoulders back, chin up, arms crossed. It’s all about making the world believe you’re stronger than you really are so they don’t chew you up and spit you out.
Though, to be perfectly honest, I do feel like a used wad of bubble gum right now. But that’s less confidence-­based and more due to the fact that the sun is stuck on the broiler setting.
Mom pauses to wipe a bead of sweat from her brow. Above our heads, a trellis reads the little garden. The space around us is a bleeding canvas of color: bright yellow marigolds, stalks of purple-­bellied aconite and pink valerian, patches of poppies and beds of wormwood. All of which are tucked away inside carefully placed shrubbery.
“Aww, Violet, let’s stop for a second. I want a cute photo of you in front of the violets,” she says, like it’s an ingenious, novel idea and not something we’ve been doing since the day I was born. “Here, take this, I have to look for my phone.”
She passes me the wrinkled trash-­pamphlet, and I squint through the creases as she looks. “ ‘Funded by an alumnus’s generous donation, the Little Garden is a curated collection of Shakespearean variety. A campus favorite, it is not uncommon to find students and staff alike basking in the beauty of—­’”
I stop reading as red splatters the page.
. . . Blood?
The very thought has my lungs seizing and my mind hurtling sixty miles per hour back to the gruesome past. Back when my friend’s body was found broken at the bottom of the school clock tower, a dark puddle beneath her soaking deep into the roots.
Her body wasn’t even cold when the press statement was released. Headmistress Lockwell issued what can only be described as a tragedy Mad Libs, with “Emoree Hale” slotted conveniently into the blanks. I learned that day that anyone can rewrite history for the right price. A “tragic fall” became an “intentional jump,” and one by one, everyone came to the consensus that Em had meant to die that day.
Everyone but me. Because I know she didn’t jump. She was pushed. And as for the murderer? It was none other than the headmistress’s eldest son, Percy Lockwell.
I growl at the memory and drag a sticky finger up...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Viking Books for Young Readers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593693191
• ISBN 13: 9780593693193
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: VIKING BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS; https://www.vtech-jouets.com/; ; Fahrenheitstraat 22; DC Weert; 6003; Niederlande